Publishing Data

UMIACS offers efficient and secure methods for publishing your data, including reports, papers, and more. This page offers best practices and guidelines for publishing your information using our resources. It also offers instructions for storing data that is within your allotted quota.

Best Practices

When publishing anything, the following items are important to consider:

• Be sure that any/all data is published via a faculty member's account or a Labgroup (see below), not a student's. This is especially important when the data in question is meant to be permanent. This will reduce the chance of any broken links once the student leaves and their UMIACS account is archived.
• OBJ (see below) should be used whenever data or websites are published.
• Make sure UMIACS is credited on any papers that contain UMIACS URLs.

LabGroups

LabGroups allow for multiple users to upload data to a central shared location. This is especially useful if multiple people are contributing to a single project. To learn more about LabGroups, visit The OBJ help page or OBJ for more information.

OBJ Usage

The use of the UMIACS Object Storage (otherwise known as OBJ) is the preferred method of publishing websites, data, and related info. Below are some short guides to publish websites and/or data on OBJ.

Uploading files/data

1. After logging in to OBJ, select "Add Bucket".
   • A "bucket" is essentially a folder that stores files.
2. Upload any datasets or other files that contain the data you wish to publish.
3. For publishing websites, continue to the "Publishing Websites" section. For datasets and the like continue on.
4. In order to make any files publicly available, click the settings cog on the right side of the file, scroll down, and click "Make Key Public"
   • Note that this makes this specific file available to anyone with the link. If you only wish to grant temporary access or access to a specific user, you may want to consider creating a timed download link or modifying the Access Control List at the bottom of the page. More information can be found on the OBJ help page

Publishing Websites

Generally, for publishing websites, you'll want to upload all your website files under one bucket. UMIACS recommends that you include an index.html file as well as a error file to be shown in case of a broken link (404). Once all these files are uploaded:

1. In the bucket, click "bucket settings" at the top of the window.
2. Under the "Website Hosting" section, put the name of your index file (usually just index.html) and the name of your 404 page.
3. Click "Submit".
   • Keep in mind that this will expose all data in your bucket. We recommend keeping any sensitive/access controlled data in a separate bucket.

The website will be made public and can be reached using the link at the right side. In order to make the website non-public, simply click "Remove Website Configuration" and then "Make Private" in the above section.

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In addition to the above, there are more ways to add data to OBJ which can prove useful, especially if working with a lot of files. See The OBJ help page for more information.